There have been two very different life cycles for great artists: some have made their greatest contributions very early in their careers, whereas others have produced their best work late in their lives. These two patterns have been associated with different working methods, as art's young...

Words have appeared in visual art since classical times, but until the modern era their use was generally restricted to a few specific functions. In the early twentieth century, the Cubists Braque and Picasso began using words in their paintings and collages in entirely new ways, and their...

This paper considers not only when in their careers the greatest artists of the twentieth century made their greatest discoveries, but also how quickly they made them. The results underscore the dominant position of Picasso and Cubism in twentieth-century art: Picasso alone accounts for the two...

A survey of textbooks reveals that scholars consider Alfred Stieglitz to have been the greatest photographer of the twentieth century, followed in order by Walker Evans, Cindy Sherman, Man Ray, and Eugène Atget. Stieglitz, Evans, and Atget were experimental artists, who were committed to...

Scholars of literature have devoted considerable attention to what they have called confessional or personal poetry, in which Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and a series of other poets, from the 1950s on, made their art out of the experiences of their own lives. Yet art scholars have not analyzed...

A survey of textbooks reveals that Le Corbusier was the greatest architect of the twentieth century, followed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The same evidence shows that the greatest architects alive today are Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano. Scholars have long been aware of the...

A survey of textbooks reveals that scholars consider Alfred Stieglitz to have been the greatest photographer of the twentieth century, followed in order by Walker Evans, Cindy Sherman, Man Ray, and Eugène Atget. Stieglitz, Evans, and Atget were experimental artists, who were committed to...

Art critics and scholars have acknowledged the breakdown of their explanations and narratives of contemporary art in the face of what they consider the incoherent era of "pluralism" or "postmodernism" that began in the late twentieth century. This failure is in fact a result of their inability...